The present invention relates generally to an electronic filing apparatus, and more particularly to an electronic filing apparatus in which image information is read from a document by an image scanner and the image information is recorded and registered in an optical disk, the electronic filing apparatus being improved so as to reduce the total processing time for reading and writing the image information for more efficient document filing.
In a conventional electronic filing apparatus which is constructed with a so-called personal computer, an image reading unit such as an image scanner is provided for scanning a document to read image information from the document, and for supplying an image signal converted from a light beam reflected from the document when being illuminated. The image information being read by the image reading unit is transferred to a recording unit such as an optical disk drive so that the image information from the document is recorded and registered in a disk storage medium which may be placed in the recording unit. The image reading unit such as an image scanner usually has a function to photoelectrically convert a light beam reflected from a document, when the document is scanned by the image reading unit, into an image signal carrying image information and has a function to supply such an image signal carrying image information. The disk storage medium such as an optical disk, which is placed in the recording unit such as an optical disk drive unit, has a great storage capacity, and one can use this disk storage medium for information storage and subsequent retrieval purposes, by writing image information to the disk storage medium or by retrieving the image information recorded in the disk storage medium.
In a conventional electronic filing apparatus, a plurality of documents are successively one by one read by the scanner and image information from each document is recorded to an optical disk which is a large capacity storage medium described above. However, in a case of the conventional electronic filing apparatus, a reading of image information from one document is completed and then a writing of the image information to the optical disk is performed. Similarly, after the subsequent documents are read by the image scanner, the image information of each document is written to the optical disk. For this reason, in the case of the conventional electronic filing apparatus, the image reading by the image sensor is performed with the image scanner, and alternately to the image reading, the writing of image information to the optical disk. Accordingly, the conventional electronic filing apparatus has a difficulty or problem in that it takes unnecessarily much time to carry out a document filing with an optical disk, because the writing of image information to the optical disk is performed each time the reading of image information from a document is completed by the image scanner. Especially, writing image information to the optical disk is time consuming, when compared with the time required for reading image information from a document, and so the conventional electronic filing apparatus inevitably shows a poor efficiency of document filing in view of the whole document filing system. And, for attaining good efficiency of the document filing system, it is necessary to shorten the writing time required for the conventional electronic filing apparatus to perform a writing of image information to the optical disk.